The Poetry of MacNeice by Louis MacNeice
The Poetry of Louis MacNeice captures the essence of 20th-century modernity, particularly reflecting on the disillusionment of life between the two World Wars. MacNeice, associated with notable contemporaries like Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden, used his poetry to document the shifting cultural landscape and the decline of past values. His work often blends the mundane with sharp, ironic insights, producing a complex portrait of industrial society and its emotional tapestry. Themes of nostalgia and lost youth permeate his poetry, with a distinctive rhythm that mimics everyday speech and often employs banal rhymes for comic effect.
Throughout his career, MacNeice's poetry expresses an awareness of the emptiness in modern life, depicting the futile attempts of individuals to find meaning amidst the monotony of existence. While he effectively captures the sadness of his era, some critics argue that his later works exhibit a weariness, where the freshness of his earlier writing becomes stale. His use of colloquial language and cultural references often evokes the spirit of his time, though it may not resonate as powerfully with future generations. Overall, MacNeice's work remains a significant exploration of the human condition in a rapidly changing world, reflecting both a keen observational style and a poignant sense of loss.
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The Poetry of MacNeice by Louis MacNeice
First published:Blind Fireworks, 1929; Poems, 1935; The Earth Compels, 1938; Autumn Journal, 1939; The Last Ditch, 1940; Plant and Phantom, 1941; Springboard: Poems 1940-1944, 1944; Holes in the Sky: Poems 1944-1947, 1948; Ten Burnt Offerings, 1952; Autumn Sequel: A Rhetorical Poem in XXVI Cantos, 1954; Visitations, 1957; Eighty-five Poems, 1959; Solstices, 1961; The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice, 1967
Critical Evaluation:
Louis MacNeice was associated in the 1930’s with Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden and, like them, directed his poetry to recording, and lamenting, the contemporary, metropolitan scene and the breakdown of older values. MacNeice’s poems, published steadily since 1929, in recent years become more and more preoccupied with the past, the poet’s lost youth and, at times, his sense of having lost his freshness as a poet.
At his best, he succeeded in mingling the commonplace and even trivial with an ironically acute insight to produce a memorable portrait of the modern industrial society. The rather forlorn and wistful attempts of metropolitan man to achieve some satisfaction in a generally treadmill life were chronicled by MacNeice in tones of mild sympathy, more detachment and, sometimes, of condescension. The rhythms are very close to prose or speech, the rhyming is often deliberately banal in order to achieve a caustically comic effect, and, occasionally, doggerel is used to express something of the tired, cheapened quality of a wasteland society. One of his best poems is “Sunday Morning,” in which his coupling of the once-valued expanding heart of man and the newly banal, vulgar substitution of working with his car on a Sunday morning illustrates a typical kind of rhetoric as well as MacNeice’s sense of how the romantic ambitions of the previous, prewar generations have become cheapened and empty of anything but momentary and shallow diversion. Disillusionment is everywhere, but the poet maintains a detached, resigned pose most of the time. In the poem, the car is readied, and the weekenders speed to Hindhead, trying to recapture something of the past and hold firmly to it in the flow of time measured by dull days and dragging weeks. Life thus becomes escape from boredom, meaninglessness, and a march of time which only destroys old dreams. There is no escape.
While, especially in his poems of the 1930’s, MacNeice is often highly successful in expressing the sadness and wistful regret of modern men caught between two wars, his verse becomes increasingly tired itself, even boring, as the rhythms grow stale and prosaic or “talky”; the constant use of comic or merely doggerel rhyme and the undifferentiated tone of slightly supercilious disillusionment, constantly verging on the merely nostalgic, wear thin. The symbols of planned obsolescence and overproduction which in turn signify the hopeless and helpless vulgarity and sterility of “modern life” cease either to surprise or to shock when constantly juxtaposed with older and “higher” thoughts. The studied use of the banal ends in sinking the poetry beneath its own dead weight. In AUTUMN JOURNAL, which is MacNeice’s long counterpart of Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” the poet is not at his worst, but one can see the direction of his thought in his ironic criticism of the modern world.
MacNeice’s ability to use dance-hall rhythms and cliches to good satiric purpose is prominent in his poem “Bagpipe Music.” The cleverness of parody and the cliche, like the colloquial idiom, belong strictly to a time and place, and though MacNeice has recorded that time, often tellingly, he has lacked the larger gifts of either Spender or, especially of the protean, effervescent Auden which are necessary for a lasting poetry.
MacNeice constantly counterpoises the older traditions and values with the present state of society. Playing off the old pastoral illusions, in “Nuts in May” he describes the breakdown of the traditional values.
MacNeice’s early influence was Edith Sitwell, and then, like Auden, C. D. Lewis and Spender, the war poetry of Sassoon and Owen. The political and moral chaos of the war and the decades following it, the manifestoes of Hulme, Pound, and Eliot for a “harder” and more “classical” poetry, the teeming and dingy metropolis, all lay behind the sort of poetry MacNeice and his friends wrote. It seemed as if all the world had turned a final corner away from the past, and the aestheticism of the 1890’s the pastoral poetry of the Georgians, in fact, the whole Keatsian and Tennysonian tradition seemed no longer a possible idiom in which to express the “new world” of quiet terror, cataclysm, and tenements. Instead, the “new” verse, close to colloquial speech, used the cliches of the shopgirl, the banalities of the popular song, the cadences of jazz, and the dance hall. In such a world, the British Museum seemed an anomaly, where one discovered poor scholars, cranks, and hacks.
Another poem, similar to “The British Museum Reading Room,” is entitled, simply, “Museums,” and jokingly expresses MacNeice’s conviction that the Past is now only the past, and the museum is where we go to find a tenuous kind of escape or refuge. MacNeice seldom “reaches” for a metaphor or a poetic effect. He uses materials ready at hand, even cliches, and often produces an adroit and truly poignant image of modern life. His tone, at best, is controlled, detached, yet sad and intelligent. He represented an awareness of self and of reality which is so scrupulous as almost to preclude poetry. He had little or none of Spender’s romanticism. His materials sometimes failed him, and do so increasingly with the passage of time away from that period when both the poetry and the disillusionment at least had the grace of novelty.